Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the Yankees get swept out of the playoffs, the Trump administration packed a year’s worth of “what is wrong with these people?” into seven days.

This week: Pete Hegseth wants to livestream an execution while he hides the deaths of his own troops. Trump signed sanctions on Russia and then cut Putin a deal. ICE agents dressed as construction workers shot a father in front of his five-year-old. ICE is offering kindergartners cash to leave the country. And the administration told international election observers to stay home. Let’s get into it.

Hegseth Plans to Livestream a Firing Squad, Takes Notes From the Taliban

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says the Army will execute the Fort Hood shooter by firing squad on December 3rd, and the Pentagon is going to livestream it.

Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, and a military jury sentenced him to death. I’m against the death penalty. But even if you’re for it, this should make you sick, because the Secretary of Defense is turning an execution into clickbait.

Hegseth told a right-wing TV host, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” Asked if Hasan had any final requests, he said, “Don’t care. We’ll see him on Dec. 3.” He called the plan a “No-brainer,” which is the first time Pete Hegseth has accurately described his own work.

The United States hasn’t held a public execution since 1936. Last year Amnesty International found exactly two countries that did. One is Iran, the regime we’re at war with. The other is Afghanistan, run by the Taliban we spent 20 years fighting. Pete looked at both of them and took notes.

Hasan is paralyzed from the waist down. So the big warrior content here is American soldiers ordered to shoot a man in a wheelchair, on camera. The Army’s own rules don’t let anyone under 18 witness an execution. Pete wants it on your kid’s phone.

Republican Congressman Austin Scott said, “live-streaming executions is what jihadists do.”

And The Washington Sun reports six soldiers are already preparing religious exemption requests so they can’t be assigned to the firing squad. One said, “I do not want my children or my family watching me pull a trigger.”

Pete, my dude. I was a soldier, and you are a disgrace to the uniform, to this country and to humanity. You’re hiding dead American soldiers with one hand and selling tickets to a killing with the other, you bloodthirsty, cowardly, attention-starved fecking ghoul. Public executions are for the Taliban, ISIS and the Third Reich. Nobody enlisted to be the cast of your snuff film.

Pentagon Calls the Undercount a Lie, Then Quietly Adds Two Dead

While Hegseth plans a watch party for that death, he’s hiding the deaths of American troops in Iran, a war Trump started without Congress and still can’t explain.

I’ve told you before about the Pentagon undercounting the dead. When the Washington Post reported it again last month, Hegseth posted, “This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE,” and said the Post was “worse than Iranian state media.”

Late Friday night, the Pentagon quietly added two deaths to its own casualty database, bringing the count to 21. One was a National Guard major who died in Kuwait in March. The military announced his death at the time and then never counted him.

So the complete lie was Pete Hegseth’s own death count.

It’s the wounded too. Soldiers hurt in the drone strike that killed six Americans in Kuwait told the Associated Press there was no evacuation plan. Some of them were Googling hospitals. They were flown to Germany on a cargo plane and put in Army barracks instead of the military hospital, reportedly because nobody had filed the paperwork saying they were wounded in combat. One lieutenant colonel said, “I can’t squeeze both arms around my kids.”

How is anyone supposed to serv